A bit of an update. I posted briefly about this series when I first started it, and it's been an adventure. The upside is that my German is coming back to me, although I've discovered that if I don't do a little bit every day, I lose vocabulary. But it's a long series -- nine volumes total, of which I now have eight and have managed to translate six.
The story in brief is the doings of four hosts who work in two different host clubs (sort of the male equivalent of geishas). Kyosuke Iwaki leaves early on to start his own club, the Rusty Nail, leaving Ryo Takaaki (whose real name is Yoji Kato) as the head host of Schnapps. The meet again, and Iwaki, as it turns out, is in love with Ryo. Things are complicated by another host at Schnapps, Takaaki Shinkawa, who is also in love with Ryo. Rejected, he leaves Schnapps to go work for Iwaki, unaware of the relationship between his new boss and Ryo. Things are complicated further by Kenzaki, who professes not to like men, but who falls in love with Shinkawa.
It turns into a character study of Ryo, who is certainly the main character through all of this, with flashbacks to his arrival in Tokyo and his mentoring by Iwaki. (Ryo's mother was a hostess in Tokyo before she moved back to her home town and opened her own club, so the milieu is a natural fit for Ryo.) It's also a fairly complex series -- almost a soap opera -- with subseries detailing the various encounters among the four men. Through it all, Ryo remains somewhat remote and uninvolved, although there are a couple of scenes in which he opens up a bit. Iwaki is similarly dispassionate, although we come to realize that he's only playing his cards close to his chest -- he understands Ryo better than anyone else and has a good sense of what's needed to win him. Shinkawa is impatient and ultimately drives Ryo away from Tokyo and back to the country, where a conversation with his mother forces Ryo to confront himself. At the end of volume 6 he returns to Tokyo, and to Iwaki -- but there's no guarantee that's going to last, particularly since Ryo is firmly convinced that relationships between men are necessarily ephemeral.
Nitta has a tendency toward melodrama, which sometimes jars, although in the case of Shinkawa, it's perfectly apt -- sometimes you want to shake him and ask him what the hell he's thinking of. On the whole, the story is complex enough and moves well enough to keep us interested. Interestingly, unlike some later efforts, there's not much in the way of sex through most of the series -- it's much more about the emotional context.
The drawing, although early Nitta (as it happens, this is her first BL series), has all the hallmarks of her style: firm, clear lines and a sense of openness in the frames. Layouts are coherent, not particularly adventurous, although firmly in the shoujo canon. And after six volumes, I'm able to discern the subtle differences in features that distinguish the characters. (It's also interesting to note Nitta's tendency to re-use character names. If Iwaki and Kato sound familiar, that's because they are the protagonists in Embracing Love: Cherished Spring -- also known as Haru wo. . . .)
It's turning out to be a good one, and I was right on one thing: it's turned out to be the ideal way to relearn German.
From Carlsen Manga.
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